Skip to main content
Main

Sweetbread Cream

A steamed sweetbread mixture with bread crumbs, cream, and seasonings, served with béchamel sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Sweetbread Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the sweetbreads by removing any membranes and cutting them finely.

Make the mixture

  1. In a bowl, combine the sweetbreads, bread crumbs, cream, seasonings, and beaten egg yolks.

  2. Gently fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites.

Steam and serve

  1. Turn the mixture into a buttered mold and cover with greased paper.

  2. Steam slowly for 40 to 50 minutes.

  3. Unmold, garnish, and serve with Béchamel Sauce.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Bread + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,445 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Lemon and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sweetbreads
Provides the main body and rich, tender meat texture of the dish.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the cream and give the mixture bulk and a soft, set structure.
Eggs
Yolks bind the mixture, while whites folded in lighten it and help it rise and set.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness so the mixture stays tender rather than dry.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Stiffly beaten whites hold air that lightens the mixture. Stirring them in vigorously knocks out that air, leaving a dense, heavy result instead of a light, tender one.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes